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Message: <blockquote data-quote="QuietBrowser" data-source="post: 6912241" data-attributes="member: 6855057">Yes, I know what it's called in core D&D Cosmology. Since I'm not using... well, almost anything from said Cosmology, I think I'm free for it.Got to say, I'm disappointed in the lack of responses here. But... I figured I might as well share the setting bible as it stands so far.Malebolge Setting Bible (Incomplete):The world of Eden was once a beautiful land of majestic, fantastic vistas. Magic flowed in the wind and water, and pulsed from deep beneath the earth; it was the essence of Eden's soul, and it gave birth to all life on Eden.In the beginning, there were two races of note. The dragons were, in their eyes, the true children of Eden; great and powerful beings who drew upon and manipulated magic in their very blood and bones. Carefree and confident in their supremacy over all, they wheeled through the skies, content to live as beasts.The other race was smaller and, at the time, seemingly insignificant. In the shadows of the great trees on the borderlands between forest and plains arose a species of naked ape that walked upright - a species that came to call itself "man". They too were touched by Eden's soul, giving them intelligence that they used to master their surroundings, forging tools from stone, wood and bone. But more importantly, they bore within them the spark of magic, and this is what propelled them into greatness.At first, those who bore the spark - Sorcerers, they came to be called, meaning "The Gifted" - could only tenuously grasp the power of the WorldSoul. Their magic was raw and wild, a chaotic force that could not always be tamed. It served its uses, turning man from simple clans of primitives to fledgeling kingdoms, a budding empire, but man was not satisfied with it.Man came to study the world around itself, and the magic within itself. In this, it turned inevitably to the dragons, studying how they used their powers until, miraculously, their sorcerers learned how to mimic the specific energies of draconic magic, rather than the wild magic they had wielded before. Though this permanently altered the way in which the sorcerers used their powers, it still provided a world-shattering truth: that magic was mutable and multifarious.Almost as if a dam had broken, other studies of magic's aspects began to bear fruit. New forms of sorcerer, such as those of shadow, began to emerge - and the foundations were laid for more practical, practiced magic. Thus was born the art of wizardry; "The Learned Ones".Humanity forged its first empire, but for all its magical marvels, it still used only the tools that nature provided them. Until the fateful day that they traveled to Nidavilir, the land of burning mountains, where they encountered the Sonnlinor - or, as they are still known today, the dwarves.Whilst man had roamed the plains and forests, the Sonnlinor had dwelled in Nidavilir, mastering the stone and fire, enduring the storms that lashed their homes, and discovering something new to humans. They had discovered metal.Humans had seen some forms of metal before, but it was the humblest and most easily worked forms; copper, silver, and the occasional piece of bronze. But the Sonnlinor had mastered iron and steel, creating weapons unlike anything humanity had seen.But if the metal arms and armor of the dwarves were alien to humans, so too was the magic humanity wielded alien to dwarves. In their drive to master the gifts of the earth, the Sonnlinor had deafened themselves to the music of the WorldSoul. An individual Sonnlinor warrior was typically superior to his or her human counterpart, but they had no defense against the power of sorcerers and wizards.Fortunately for all, humanity did not want to fight. They were too amazed to find they had kindred born of the WorldSoul, and were eager to make peace. Tentatively at first, diplomacy formed ties between the two races. Exchanges of material goods - acts of sorcery in exchange for forged metal - ultimately led the way to exchange of knowlege. Humans learned to work metal, and dwarves learned the arts of magic; through their own distinctive perception of the WorldSoul, dwarves focused their mastery on elemental control, favoring storm, earth, fire and metal, the elements that had given them life. They pioneered the arts of runic binding and of alchemy, building their own take on the arts of entrapping and exploiting the natural energies of the world around them.And, in the process, humans learned from their dwarven kin, shamelessly assimilating these new discoveries into their own greater understanding of magic's many forms and arts.The first of the Mulzhennedar were born from this era, unions of respect and admiration between man and dwarf leading to the mingling of blood and the surprising development of half-breeds. Though hardly expected, the Muls were welcomed and honored by both races, a living symbol of the fundamental kinship between the two races.As the empires of humanity and the Sonnlinor spread across the world, inevitably, mages of all kinds looked outward, seeking to discover if Eden's WorldSoul sang alone in the cosmos or if its music was part of some aetherical choir.The results were amazing. Through trial, effort and immense patience, the denizens of Eden began to slowly map out the cosmos around them.Alternate planes of reality, places even more strongly steeped in magical energy and defined by its nature, were revealed. Although scholar-mages postulated the existence of others and eagerly sought, their findings in the modern day are mostly lost. But several major planes became firmly entrenched in the common knowledge of arcanists:The Twisting Nether: This strange void-like realm, a place of swirling multi-hued mists, ghostly voices, and weird "bubbles" of abandoned reality, was the first alternate plane to be discovered, and is most well-known for its unique ability to allow one to literally walk to any other plane in existence. As a "transitive plane", many sages argued the proposition that is a spiritual reflection of the physical space in which Eden and other worlds orbit. It is no place for the unwary or the weak to travel; beyond its own native hazards, many strange and unearthly extraplanar beings dwell here.The Feywild: A weird and mystical land, a place of maddening beauty and terrifying glamor. This primal realm seemed to be the very incarnation of life, a place where plants, animals and magic all thrived with an intensity unmatched on Eden. Its denizens, the fae, operated by their own peculiar rules and rituals, making them unpredictable and driven by extremely intense emotions.The Maelstrom: Believed to be the raw building blocks of creation, the Maelstrom or Elemental Chaos is an infinitely vast plane where elemental matter and energy twists and shapes itself in fashions alien even to a magical world like Eden and to a degree even the Malebolge cannot claim. Moving forests of iron, rivers of lightning, floating continents drifting icy anti-lava, and other such wonders are born from the turbulence, sometimes lasting for thousands of years, other times barely lasting an hour before being dissolved into the next miraculous display of elemental majesty.The Shadowfell: Least understood of the various realms, the Shadowfell is the dark counterpart to the Feywild. Here, in what are sometimes known as the Lands of Eternal Darkness, death is all. The souls of the dead make their final journey, vanishing to whatever mysterious fates await them, and strange entities of death, undeath and madness dwell in the endless night.The Infernum: The sages of Eden were never able to satisfactorily discern if this strange, awful realm was in fact a plane in its own right or some particularly dismal corner of the Shadowfell or Twisting Nether. Its inhabitants refer to themselves as demons, grotesque beings caught up in an eternal war against both their own kind and against the denizens of the Paradiso - a race that the fiends claim were their progenitors, eons ago.The Paradiso: At first glance a beautiful realm of crystal and precious metals, Paradiso hides a darkness behind its gilt. Like its dark mirror the Infernum it's unclear exactly where this realm lies in the cosmos. Its proud and haughty denizens, the angels, are known for both their absent-minded contempt for most mortal beings and for their eternal feud against the demons.As studies of the worlds beyond grew, magical rites of summoning, binding and controlling were codified, founding the mage's school of conjuration.It was also learned that more powerful extraplanar entities could offer strange bargains to willing mortals, imbuing those who had previously lacked such talents with unique magical abilities in exchange for service, creating the concept of the "warlock", the "oath-mage". Such mystics were never greatly popular, as it was seen as an admission of laziness or ineptitude to turn to an outside source for power instead of studying or honing one's internal power, but the art was never made illegal.Some wizards instead approached these "patrons" from a different angle, creating an alternative form of conjuration that was close to, but different from, the art of the warlock; these were the theurgists.As humanity looked outward into the cosmos, ultimately, they found something looking back.From a distant sphere that they refered to only as "Aelfheim", they came on ships that had once been plants, only to be refashioned into vessels that could sail the sea of stars. Tall and eerily elegant, these alien humanoids called themselves the Aelfar, although humans and Sonnlinor alike tended to corrupt that into the name of "elf" and "elves".Contact with these aliens was tense and difficult, hindered by Aelfarian arrogance and subtle nuances in language. Humanity managed to piece together that Aelfheim had been a world without its own soul, instead caught between the fluctuating energies of the Feywild and the Shadowfell, and that though this turmoil had given the Aelfar life, it had ultimately destroyed the world and forced the survivors to flee in search of a new home to claim.Fittingly, the Aelfar had developed their magic around the principles of power inherent in life and death. But unlike some warlocks allied to fae patrons, the Aelfar did not consider themselves servants of the natural cycle, but its masters. Aelfar magical traditions exploited and controlled, dominating life and death alike. Plants, animals and fungi were shaped through magic into forms useful to Aelfar civilization, whilst even the bodies of the dead could be made to work until the Aelfar saw fit to release them.Humanity had already grasped the principles of wood elementalism, but it was from the Aelfar that they learned the concepts of necromancy.Despite the chilly superiority of the Aelfar and their oft-disturbing culture, humanity strove to be a good neighbor and welcomed the Aelfar to settle on Eden. After all, their world was large enough for all, and these cousins from another world had lost their home - it was seen as the height of bad manners to reject them when they were so in need.Unfortunately for all, the Sonnlinor were not so welcoming. Dwarf and elf took a seemingly instant dislike to each other. Aelfar arrogance and dismissal of the dwarven-prized arts of stonecraft & metalwork as "lifeless" incensed the Sonnlinor. Meanwhile, the dwarven disgust for their practices of necromancy and flesh-shaping to create living tools infuriated the Aelfar.Such distaste would have led to nothing more than a footnote in the history books, the two races simply holding each other at arm's bay, had it not been for the presence of hotheaded fools on both sides of the racial divide.The names of those who ultimately fanned the flames that became the Doom War are unknown, and some humans just roundly curse both races for being idiots. What is known is that Aelfar and Sonnlinor began to clash. At first, it was seemingly by accident; Aelfar colonists would unwittingly claim territories already possessed by Sonnilinor clans, or Sonnlinor expeditions would harvest minerals and reagents from fledgling Aelfar settlements without realising they were robbing their new neighbors.As the years went by, though, such incidents became and more brazen, leading to acts of open sabotage, banditry and finally brushwars. Human diplomats strove to try and bring the two races to peaceful accord, but no sooner would one incident be smoothed over than another would occur.War was the inevitable result, a cycle of vendetta that spread further and further, until both races were openly at arms against each other. Humans still upheld a neutral policy, but their diplomatic efforts were in vain. To this day, rumors persist of human war profiteers and spies taking advantage of the bloody conflict still linger.The elfin/dwarfin conflict is now officially considered to have blossomed into the Doom War with a single incident; the Pestilence of Clanhold Urdinnar.</blockquote>

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